The optimism of #Purpose & science of #design in forging #digital customer experiences! Opinions my own!

The C-suite is suddenly getting more crowded. The Chief Customer Officer is becoming a staple of modern business, with more established brands hiring CCOs to lead the charge to resolve customer issues, create profitable customers and drive the company-customer relationship. 

A recent Forbes study found that 10% of Fortune 500 companies have already adopted the role, a percentage that jumps to 22% among the Fortune 100.

What does a chief customer officer do, exactly?And what are they meant to do? Having the right mandate is just one of the challenges confronting the newest member of the executive team. As a relatively new position in many companies, the CCO’s day-to-day tasks are broad—and also vague. Essentially, the CCO is expected to form deep personal relationships with the company’s customers to truly understand them. 

Customer-centric organisations are highly collaborative + transparent; it’s the secret sauce to delivering awesome, magical experiences and relationships. Only through enterprise-wide transparency, information sharing, proactive feedback, ideation and communication patterns that transcend hierarchical organization structures can teams respond to customer expectations and quickly resolve issues. It’s 20% ideas, 80% execution. Actually we could argue it’s 100% execution, as we plough through hanging fruits.

We see that the career paths of past CCOs are any indication, companies that have established this role appear to be succeeding. Quite a few CxOs (Chief Customer Experience Officers) have morphed into being CCOs; the CCOs are essentially CxOs with P&L responsibility and increased accountability for execution.

We see that many former CCOs rise internally to COO, president of a business unit and eventually to chief executive. Companies “recognize the value of the chief customer officer as a stepping-stone into roles of greater responsibility and authority.” It’s almost like layering financial accountability on the experience, transposing the organisation over time to be more and more customer focused.

The goals, in my opinion, of the CCO are, but not limited to:

• Engaging the organisation in managing customer relationships, revenue, and profit; there are intricacies in how a journey-led organisation is operated, and the CCO is key

• Create a persistent, enduring focus on the customer franchise in the actions the company takes; e.g. taking over startup pods and operationalising new ways of working

• Drive the organisation to work together for optimum customer experience delivery; this is a full fledged Delivery role not that of a strategy or transformation office

• Support leaders in their role as cultural leaders in the transformation journey; perhaps most important, transformation of hearts and North Star with sole focus on the customer

As a Champion, evangelist and advocate of the Customer in the organisation, the CCO performs several specific functions:

1. Establishes metrics defining the relationship with customers

The CCO usually partners up with the CFO and CMO to establish baseline/ practical often new metrics; whereas “pounding the rock”, solving for optimal customer intimacy requires disciplined execution, engagement & alignment with all other functions, e.g. a Transformation office (CTrO), the CDO, CTO and CIOs respectively. Initial pain-point fixes might be “downstream”, channels related, but over time, these would move “upstream”, where product, marketing and network quality issues persist.

• Customer effort based metrics; simple metrics to manage customers as an asset; these can include layering NPS to CES with a balance of EES and Trust, Purpose etc.

• Voice of the Customer competency development; the CxA and JxA (Customer Experience, Journey Analytics) fabric

• Real-time issue trending and tracking (such as complaints); this can be an entirely outsourced function to be monetised (in-sourcing all agency media functions over time, and eventually starting up a separate business unit as part of a larger ecosystem e.g. with banks, retailers)

• Owning all the customer/ enterprise feedback loops and uniting a company-wide approach to engage, and tap on the “pulse of the customer”.

• Optimising for “listening” pipe opportunities, web, social media, field, etc.

• Create a united platform for understanding and taking action, engaging customers – calling this the experiential fabric of the company (which JxA is a part of). In my opinion, Digital and Tech rolls into the CCO as well, giving him/ her full accountability to delight customers. In today’s world, every transformation is digital in some form, and we should embrace that, if our Purpose is to create awesome, magical experiences.

2. Influences, even coerces enterprise wide agreement on how to optimise greatest (balancing, aligned to Purpose) value to customers

• Define what customers value – how to determine the differentiating experience to be delivered; we see the increasing use of Design Thinking to converge and diverge on ideas, but ultimately these need to be implemented- initially as prototypes.

• Determine what customers to invest in; again aligned with Purpose (rather, customers would resonate with the company’s authenticity)

• Decide where to make investment decisions, that is, the highest-impact contacts and efforts; worthwhile to note the CCO will own the lion’s share of the company’s budget

• Create a common language set and definitions for the customer experience.

3. The CCO in partnership with the C-suite especially the CEO, drives ultimate accountability through cross company data and metrics – with the customer in focus

• Facilitate the development of the accountability action chain, establishing the approaches and implementation of research to understand customer loyalty and return on investment (ROI); the CCO in my opinion owns the transposed customer-centric organisation. Earlier incarnations of this would typically be segments based (needs and wants, demographics and behavioural), but adept practitioners would opt for a fully journey-led organisation. Imagine an organisation lying flat on its belly, transposed, with a sole focus, obsession on the customer.

• Work with leaders to identify baseline metrics for tracking interaction with customers; to demystify this, the CCO would have to tear through a cobweb of archaic near obsolete KPIs and co-create new ones with his/ her fellow executives.

• Drive tracking and reporting to get to reliability in key interactions; the CCO is the drummer, keeping the drumbeat of the customer focused organisation. He or she needs to inculcate an unwavering, focused discipline on the execution of fixes Big and Small, solving for optimal customer engagement

• Lead the accountability forums – when to meet with whom to drive accountability; typically an Episodic Governance construct akin to a CoE, but doesn’t matter, as the CCO can tap on the company’s existing transformative, project delivery engines – but with clear delineation as the CCO owns the entire innovation cycle, eventuating into BAU and operations over time.

• Work with leaders on messages, reinforcing, recommendations for recognition, and driving the culture change forward. Aside from the CEO, the CCO is the next most significant Purpose beacon in the organisation, imbuing the company’s Why with customer obsession.

4. Establishes a common approach and process (way of working) driving change across the organisation

• Identify operational accountability cross-functional alliances. It’s a downtrodden job, but one that must be done. Customer-centricity is hard work, and all about delivering quality.

• Facilitate working together across the silos instead of separately within them; usually done through a central governance body, typically the transformation office where “microcosms” of the aspirational journey-led organisation exists

• Instill the discipline of process change and change management into the organisation; today many an organisation are going agile, for full transparency.